She suspected she needed to watch more Oprah.
Although women who save the world and the men who confuse them sounded more like a visit to Jerry Springer—provided she gained a hundred and fifty pounds and lost half of her vocabulary.
Look, if he’s not questioning, why should you? With that settled, she took another drink.
“So, where do we go from here?”
“Why do we have to go anywhere?” she demanded when the choking and coughing had subsided and all of the remaining napkins had been used to deal with the mess. “What’s wrong with the way things are?”
“I just wondered where you were being Summoned to,” Dean explained, somewhat taken aback by the sight of Claire snorting coffee out her nose. “But if you don’t want to talk about it…”
“About what?” She dabbed at the damp spots on her sleeve, trying and failing miserably to sound anything but near panic. Definitely more Oprah.
“About the Summoning.”
“Right.” Of course, the Summoning. Deep calming breath. “North.”
“Back across the border, then?”
“Probably.”
“Is it another metaphysical remnant causing localized fluxes in the barrier between actuality and possibility.”
That made her smile. “Another ghost kicking holes in the fabric of the universe? I don’t know.” When he smiled back, she covered an embarrassing reaction with a brusque, “You’re getting good at this.”
“Two this week,” he reminded her.
Claire was fairly certain that her current attraction to the restless dead was merely leftover sensitivity from spending so much time with Jacques, the French-Canadian sailor who’d been haunting the Elysian Fields Guest House. But, because that previous attraction had gone farther than…well, than things were going now, she wasn’t going to mention it to Dean. With any luck the residual effects would wear off soon.
What she’d had with Jacques had been simple. He’d been dead. The possibilities between them had been finite. The possibilities with Dean, however, were…
She saw them suddenly, stretching out in front of her.
Driving together from site to site, squabbling over what radio station to listen to and/or listening in perfect accord to a group they both liked. And if anything was possible, there had to be a group they both liked. Somewhere.
Sharing endless hotel rooms like this one, same burnt-orange bedspreads in a vaguely floral pattern, same mid-brown stain camouflaging indoor/outdoor carpeting, same lame attempt to modernize the decor by pasting a wallpaper border just under the ceiling, same innocuous prints screwed to the wall over both beds.
Sharing one of those beds.
They’d work together. They’d laugh together. They’d clean up after Austin together—although the possibility of Dean doing the actual cleaning all by himself was significantly greater than them doing it together.
And one day, she’d forget he wasn’t a Keeper, or even one of the less powerful Cousins, and something would come through the barrier, and she’d forget to protect him from it. Or it would try to get to her through him. Or he’d try to protect her and get squashed like a bug. Okay, a six-foot-tall, muscular, blue-eyed, glasses-wearing bug from Newfoundland, but the result would be the same.
All of a sudden, the future with Dean seemed frighteningly finite.
I might as well just paint a target on him now and get it over with.
“Claire? Boss?” It took an effort, but Dean resisted the urge to wave a hand in front of her face. If she was in some sort of Keeper trance, he didn’t want to disturb it.
He’d seen a number of amazing things during the three months he’d worked for her at the Elysian Fields Guest House—up to and including Hell itself—but nothing had prepared him for time spent on the road in Claire Hansen’s company. He’d expected her to be a backseat driver, but that had turned out to be Austin’s job. She didn’t eat properly unless he placed food in front of her—he was beginning to understand both why Austin was so insistent about being fed and why Claire was so thin. And she actually preferred watching hockey with that stupid blue light the American television stations were using to help their viewers locate the puck. Trust the Americans not to realize that knowing the position of the puck was the whole point of the game.
He liked the way she felt in his arms, and he liked the way her face lit up when she looked at him. He liked looking at her just generally, and he liked being with her. And he was becoming fairly certain that liked wasn’t quite the right word. When he thought about his future, she was a part of it.
“We can’t travel together anymore.”
Or not. Dean looked around for help, but the sounds of vigorous excavation from the bathroom suggested Austin was in the litter box. “What did you say?” He felt as though he’d just been cross-checked into the boards and should be staring through Plexiglas at a row of screaming faces instead of across the remains of a takeout breakfast into a pair of worried brown eyes.
“We can’t travel together anymore.”
“But I though we were…? I mean, aren’t we…?” he shook his head, trying to find a question he could actually articulate. “Why not, then?”
“Someday I’ll run into something I won’t be able to keep from hurting you.”
He was about to tell her that he was willing to risk it in order to be with her when she continued, and the conversation headed off in a new, or rather an old, direction.
“It’s why Keepers don’t travel with Bystanders.”
“I thought we’d moved past that Keeper/Bystander thing?”
“We can’t move past that Keeper/Bystander thing.”
The sudden quiet resonated with the sound of clay particles being flung all over
